A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you to
and across Canal street, the central avenue of the city, and to that
corner where the flower women sit at the inner and outer edges of the
arcaded sidewalk, and make the air sweet with their fragrant
merchandise. The crowd and if it is near the time of the carnival it
will be great will follow Canal street.

But you turn, instead, into the quiet, narrow way which a lover of
Creole antiquity, in fondness for a romantic past, is still prone to
call the Rue Royale. You will pass a few restaurants, a few auction
rooms, a few furniture warehouses, and will hardly realize that you
have left behind you the activity and clatter of a city of merchants
before you find yourself in a region of architectural decrepitude, where
an ancient and foreign seeming domestic life, in second stories,
overhangs the ruins of a former commercial prosperity, and upon
everything has settled down a long Sabbath of decay. The vehicles in the
street are few in number, and are merely passing through; the stores are
shrunken into shops; you see here and there, like a patch of bright
mould, the stall of that significant fungus, the Chinaman. Many great
doors are shut and clamped and grown gray with cobweb; many street
windows are nailed up; half the balconies are begrimed and rust eaten,
and many of the humid arches and alleys which characterize the older
Franco Spanish piles of stuccoed brick betray a squalor almost oriental.

Yet beauty lingers here. To say nothing of the picturesque, sometimes
you get sight of comfort, sometimes of opulence, through the unlatched
wicket in some porte cochère red painted brick pavement, foliage of
dark palm or pale banana, marble or granite masonry and blooming
parterres; or through a chink between some pair of heavy batten
window shutters, opened with an almost reptile wariness, your eye gets a
glimpse of lace and brocade upholstery, silver and bronze, and much
similar rich antiquity.

The faces of the inmates are in keeping; of the passengers in the street
a sad proportion are dingy and shabby; but just when these are putting
you off your guard, there will pass you a woman more likely two or
three of patrician beauty.

Now, if you will go far enough down this old street, you will see, as
you approach its intersection with . Names in that region elude one
like ghosts.

However, as you begin to find the way a trifle more open, you will not
fail to notice on the right hand side, about midway of the square, a
small, low, brick house of a story and a half, set out upon the
sidewalk, as weather beaten and mute as an aged beggar fallen asleep... Continue reading book >>